Alright, a friend of mine and I have started working on a short psychological thriller sort of film, and we decided it would work best for atleast most of the film to be done in black and white. I have no real experience with black and white and am looking for some advice on properly lighting the scenes which are supposed to be at night, so i have two problems in a sense. any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

What kind of mood are you looking for?

You could study old classic films like Nosferatu and Cabinet of Dr Caligari or films noirs to give you some ideas and help narrow down what you might like to see for your film.

Also are you talking about interior or exterior scenes?

the setting is indoor and we're trying for a chaotic confused sort of mood.

I would say try it with lots of lines/shadows, which you can do with lighting and set design. Just my opinion, though.

I would definitely watch Pi and Eraserhead....those are seriously amazing examples of black and white filmmaking that have that confused/chaotic feel with ingenious lighting. I think you will get a lot of good ideas from them.

Thanks I'll look for those.

Well with B&W film, you have a much better opportunity for dramatic contrast between light and dark areas in the frame. So especially when you are going for a darker, more confused mood it is important to really take advantage of this opportunity, which means you have to transition from using natural ambient lighting to using an unnatural, more dramatic spot lighting technique.
Here are some screencaps from Eraserhead to help illustrate what I mean:






You see what I mean? How the light is being used much more as a highlighter than as an ambient fill.

So for a very effective confused mood, a good technique is to start with a very dark environment and use very direct and specific lights to "pull" characters out of the background and to highlight the important areas in the frame while leaving the rest of the environment shadowy, eerie, and unknown. Also I think its a very nice touch to have one or two low-watt lamps or bulbs in the background as props and as high-contrast isolated "refuges" of light. (you can kind of see this in the 3rd picture, but its not the best example)

well for some reason i can't see the pictures but I think I understand what you're saying: I should essentially just use a strong key light. I also read somewhere that it makes it more eerie to light the subject from below. I gonna do some experimenting to get a feel for it, thanks for the help.

My bad. I forgot Flickr has some preventative measures against linking, and I didn't notice it because the images were still saved in my cache so they loaded as normal. Heres two of the ones I was trying to show you

well thanks, those help a lot, the first one with the light comin through the window really shows how that contrast works. I'm assuming the second one is where you were talkin about background 'refuges' of light?